Writing

Writing has been an important part of my life, both personally and professionally. As I reflect upon the training I received to be a writer the first thing that hits me is how this was taught me, especially in elementary and high school. Three components were stressed very early: penmanship, spelling and grammar.

Penmanship was a special subject and each week a period was set aside during which we were supposed to learn “the Palmer Method”. We had very specific instructions on how to hold our pencils and how to move our wrists. It was all wasted on me. My penmanship was and is very poor. This was in contrast to my Mother who had beautiful handwriting. She went only to the 6th grade yet her letters to me were always in beautiful handwriting. When I later tried to write Chinese characters I found that my handwriting in Chinese was even worse than in English or German. 

Spelling was also a separate subject all the way through to the eighth grade. Each week we had a list of words to learn to spell. The teacher called out the words and we had to write them out, hopefully with the correct spelling. I did okay in the class exercise, but when I (up to this day) write in paragraphs my spelling always needs lots of corrections.

Grammar was very important. Early on we had to learn the parts of speech and proper rules of grammar. Already at the 4th grade level we had to diagram sentences. This was a method of charting subjects, predicates, direct and indirect objects, adjectival and adverbial clauses, prepositional phrases etc. etc. I always enjoyed it up to the time in Zion Lutheran School when we were challenged to diagram the longest sentence with which we were familiar. That was Martin Luther’s 17-word explanation of the Second Article (about Jesus). 

Writing essays, compositions, narratives or poetry was simply not stressed at any level of my schooling. In grad school the emphasis went to documentation and bibliographical notations. My master’s thesis was written well before computers and my wife Jane who did the typing on an old non-electric typewriter reminds me that no erasures or corrections were allowed and foot-noting sources was a major challenge.

Most of my professional career gave me the opportunity and responsibility to write material for publication. I wrote devotional, educational, and motivational materials. As I recall publishing more than 200 articles, two books and hundreds of blogs I am grateful for the lessons learned in handwriting, spelling and grammar that sent me on the road to writing.